Sorry, then I don’t know. I tried ubuntu afew times, but always found it very confusing. I always end up installing plain debian again.
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Just to give you an example of running on a semi-old PC; I am running mine (Debian + HA in docker) on a second generation NUC, D53427RKE (rev.1 or 2). I bought it in September 2013 and it’s still running with the same Intel 525 SSD I bought back then and 4 GB Kingston value RAM. All in a passively cooled case.
It runs PLENTY fast for me. It was a huge improvement over the RPI 3B.
So you don’t need to spend much on the hardware side to have an excellent performance. Save that money for some other gadgets.
RPI 4 with an SSD 
Thanks for the help.
Any more particular selections from amazon or something would be very helpful
I think if go to NUC I have to extra disk and ram (as a friend told me) and ideally I would like to avoid it
I prefer to buy a plug & play option
Have you taken the time to read and use my guide?
It will have you up and running with Ubuntu in a matter of 1-2hrs at most.
You seem to keep persisting with more complicated methods instead of starting fresh.
Yes, of course I did. The problem was that I never used Putty or WinSCP, so it was going to be an extra difficulty for me. I thought I will lose more time to manage to connect and do the stuff I was prompt.
I also had to install Portainer which again I didn’t know what it is and the same goes for “Docker containers”. Even if I did manage to come this step I didn’t know what the containers are and how to manage them. 
** Yesterday, one more question raised. How I can connect to my rp3+ in order to give sudo commands or update the firmware if necessary?
OK, well, if you aren’t willing to try and follow the guide and learn as you go, then no one can help you.
It is a learning curve for anyone staring out, but you have to try to be able to learn.
Using a program to connect to your server is an extra difficulty?
Why did you “HAVE” to install Portainer? If you don’t know what Docker containers are, why not use your favorite search engine and learn it?
PuTTY…which you refused to want to learn apparently.
In my point of view, it is. Since I have no experience on Linux, or server management I have to search and understand in a foreign language so many terms and abbreviations.
Don’t forget that my main goal is to learn to handle Home Assistant. In many cases I am reading a sentence and I have to look for hours in order to understand what I have to do.
The instructions said so. I didn’t know that this was optional
I did search what containers and Portainer are and I have to admit that I can’t understand it exactly.
Just to let you know the past 1-2 hours I am trying to understand what mqtt is and still can’t.
As I said earlier for the time being I am testing and learning. (slowly, but learning)
Until I get the NUC or whatever machine, my main goal the past weekend was to install a version of linux to see the “environment” and to migrate a copy o HA. Which I did.
(I also installed deconz and added my first sensor!)
For a (my) weekend it was good and enjoy it, and this is what I look after.
Probably in the next month I will be ready to follow the guide
Do you know what “portable apps” are in the Windows world? You might have seen some mentions around the internet of a portable app on your computer, that can be dropped onto a thumbdrive and run anywhere?
Docker is a “similar” concept.
Docker itself is quite simple from a 30,000 ft view, and you shouldn’t dive into the technology behind it yet.
It is simply a way to run an app without worrying about dependencies (generally these apps will have a web GUI, or provide a service to the network, not an app like Word). A developer can write their software, bundle ALL the dependencies into the docker “image” and distribute it. The end user doesn’t have to worry about what version of python, or Apache, NGINX, Java, or whatever the app needs to run…It just runs. The running “image” is called a “container”.
Portainer is just a web frontend to manage a Docker installation and all the containers that are running on that machine.
MQTT is simply a service that is publishing and subscribing messages. The service listens on a port for MQTT data. It doesn’t care what that data is. The object is just to be a message bus.
Want to get information TO mqtt? You “publish it” on a topic to the server. A topic is nothing more than a “path” to the message data. You want to grab the data OFF mqtt? You subscribe to that topic with your MQTT client
Thanks! In theory (at least) I do understand now what docker,container, and portainer are.
MQTT is still difficult to “digest”. The way I understand it right now is, that it is “something like” conbee ii.
I think I have seen for example, that people use it to “connect” tasmotised sonoff devices.
Instead of using the conbee usb they “use” a external or internal server in order to communicate the device with HA.
Meanwhile I found this which helped
What I don’t understand now when there is a need to use MQTT.
And I am completely lost when I am reading something like the following
For a check, you can use the command line tools mosquitto_pub shipped with mosquitto to send MQTT messages. This allows you to operate your switch manually:
mosquitto_pub -h 127.0.0.1 -t home/bedroom/switch1 -m "ON"
Bash
SET THE STATE OF A DEVICE WITH ESPEASY
Assuming that you have flashed your ESP8266 unit with ESPEasy. Under “Config” is a name (“Unit Name:”) set for your device (here it’s “bathroom”). A configuration for a “Controller” for MQTT with the protocol “OpenHAB MQTT” is present and the entries (“Controller Subscribe:” and “Controller Publish:”) are adjusted to match your needs. In this example, the topics are prefixed with “home”. There is no further configuration needed as the GPIOs can be controlled with MQTT directly.
Manually you can set pin 13 to high with mosquitto_pub or another MQTT tool:
I am sure though that this is not for me right now 
I am still trying to find some way to sent a message to my phone when the leak sensor reports problem.
and this why I started to search what MQTT is. I don’t have yet a device tracker and read somewhere that this is a more reliable method these days.
Makis
I think you are doing well. I do not know why the machine you have starts with a black screen. Seems to be some compatibility issue with the graphics driver.
There are many flavours of Ubuntu and Ubuntu again is built on Debian and they all share the same basic packaging system for software (called Aptitude and you see the commands apt-get or apt for installing and upgrading software). The only difference between the different Ubuntu is the desktop environment and besides the initial installation and an occational trouble shoot session. With home assistant, once installed you can do must from the browser.
What you want on your Windows computer (which I assume is your daily well known computer platform) is to be able to log into your Home Assistance box with a terminal. For this you use a protocol called secure shell (abbreviated ssh).
The very simple free software we all use for this is called putty. It is dead simple. All you have to put is the ip address of the home assistant machine and select ssh. And then open. And it opens a terminal window so you can login with your username and password.
WinSCP is a program that can copy files between Windows and Linux using ssh. If you have setup Samba and have learned to map a shared drive on the Windows machine then you do not really need WinSCP
But Putty is a really nice way to log into a terminal session to upgrade the Ubuntu or restart the machine etc.
Portainer is a tool to manage Dockers. You do not need this at all for Home Assistant. When you have installed Home Assistant as hass.io the way the official installation guide says, then you have Docker installed and Home Assistant installed in Dockers. And that is transparent to you. When you install addons in Home Assistant in the web browser, they get installed as Docker containers with a one click approach and settings are done in the webbrowser.
I can recommend to install one of the nice addons that enable you to edit configuration files in your browser.
To the rest that give advice on this thread. Try and remember how it was to be a newbie and allow people to take ONE step at a time and get the basics learned first. You cannot learn everything at once. And you do not need to.
First step was to get a basic mainstream Linux working and put Home Assistant on it the official way.
Next must be to make basic Home Assistant stuff working. One step at a time.
As @KennethLavrsen said, Putty is an app to connect to your home assistant server over ssh. If you don’t want to install Putty for some reason, Windows 10 has ssh built-in. So no need to install, if you don’t want to. Try this:
- Press “windows key + r”
- Type “cmd”, press Enter
- Type “ssh username@ip-of-your-home-assistant-device”, press Enter
- There will be a prompt asking something like “if you trust this connections…”, type “yes”, press Enter
- There will be a prompt asking for your password, enter the password for home assistant, press Enter
- Done!
The use of MQTT is only if you need a device to communicate with another device, and there is no direct integration.
For example, you have a sensor that can talk to MQTT (sonoff/tasmota/esphome/etc), and you want to connect that to Home Assistant. You simply configure that sensor to talk to the same MQTT broker that your Home Assistant is using, and publish to the correct topic. You configure Home Assistant to SUBSCRIBE to the same topic (some devices are handled automatically if they are programmed with HA support, in the form of discovery). MQTT is not necessary to get Home Assistant running, and only required if you have a component that requires it.
This is handled by the notify component/integration. It has nothing to do with MQTT. Message Queuing is not a protocol for communicating with your phone (unless you use a specific app to do so)
Thank you all again. I just connected with PuTTY and yes it is easier than I thought.I had help because I did find a video explaining the procedure which made my life much easier.
Earlier with an electrician we installed a basic sonoff switch to my water heater so now I have to automate this also.
This is exactly what my guide does, you have obviously not had a read of it. It’s my best effort to make an install as beginner friendly as possible, to help new comers, such as @Makis.
It covers install and set up of Ubuntu, Putty, Samba, WinSCP, and, as you seem to be quite set on, installing HA “the official way”. The HA installation instructions listed are based on the official docs, with some added explanations - all with embedded download links to the software mentioned to make it super easy to get going. It’s essentially a copy/paste solution.
Many have used it and had success with it, hence why I was directing Makis to use it. It is specifically designed to cover most of the things discussed in this thread, and many many others threads that all go the same way.
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Correct
I guide a beginner to follow the official documentation on the official site. It is what we can be reasonably sure is correct and up to date.
And people will arrive to this forum topic in a year. And then it will still be up to date to refer to the official installation documentation. It guided me well when I started a year ago and got me safely to a well working hass.io both on my first Raspberry Pi and now on my NUC.
I agree with pointing a beginner to the official documentation. I am a HUGE proponent of that.
However, in situations like this, where the beginner doesn’t understand the basics of things like SSH, WinSCP, or Linux at all…it’s important to point them to a resource that explains that information to them. All wrapped up in a nice package that relates DIRECTLY to how they are trying to use it…so if pointing them to the official documentation fails them, pointing them to another resource that SUPPLEMENTS the official documentation is a good thing.
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It was actually mainly the many postings where you suggested Proxmox and VMs that I was thinking about with my remark. And the note about having to understand every step of the installation.
I just read the pdf from Kanga_who and it uses the official alternative install method. And it does not explanin what every apt-get line does and it should not. They are installations of dependencies that most of us never need to understand in depth
Your pdf is not bad at all. I could suggest a couple of small improvements.
I think you can simplify the steps related to moving the data from the old Home Assistant to the new. The classical usecase is a relatively new user wanting to move from a Raspberry Pi hass.io to a more powerful machine and the safe method is creating a snapshot on the old and moving that over.
I like WinSCP and it is a good tool I use myself, but you also take the user through installation of Samba which is a good step as it enables the user to map a drive on his Windows machine and be in safe known territory. And then you do not need WinSCP. One more thing you can learn later and one less thing to learn during installation process.
Last I see no need to include the Portainer installation in a beginner guide. Until you learn Docker and what Docker is Portainer does not really add much value. I would end the guide by getting hass.io installed, Samba setup incl mapping it to a drive in Windows, copying over the snapshot if you are in upgrade mode and then guide the user back to the official documentation flow about how to configure Home Assistant after installation. At this moment the beginner is not in a mode where he will be asking questions about how to install Docker based software outside the hass.io realm. The beauty of hass.io is exactly to shield the users from the very geeky Docker environment with it app store and one click installations.
The issue is that the official documentation is difficult to follow if you are a newer user and can be hard to find the correct information, hence why we have posts such as this being made, ad nauseam. It is entirely the reason I worked on the guide and sought advice from other forums regulars who offer installation advice on a regular basis - to be able to say, “Follow this and you will succeed”.
I will continue to recommend it to newer users looking to take the next step with their HA install for this reason and update it (as I note at the end of the document) as needed to match the official documents, or changes to installation methods.
I have a draft update that explains how to backup and restore with more details. I think providing multiple ways to achieve the same thing is helpful. I personally prefer to backup my yaml files and copy/paste them back with WinSCP. Everyone has a different preference which is why I provide alternative methods.
Again, I provide different methods as each person will like one way more than the other. You might prefer Samba, I prefer WinSCP. They achieve the same thing in a different way, neither one is more correct than the other.
I disagree.
If someone is looking to take the next step, and not use the HassOS image to install and purely run Hass.io as is the topic of this thread, “Move from raspberry to mini PC”, I think Portainer is a helpful tool. The guide does not recommend the absolute beginners method of a Pi and HassOS, it is for those who wish to utilize their hardware for other things, and potentially use Docker to install software outside the HA ecosystem.
Installing Portainer doesn’t do anything to harm the installation, and the user may well not touch it for months or longer, but, it will be there when the user is ready to take further steps, or wish to understand how Docker works and see how their installation looks.
Again, I disagree. If this was the case, we wouldn’t have dozens of threads from users asking how to install Hass.io on a PC, NUC, Pi with Raspbian etc. Your use case describes using HassOS to install Hass.io, when Hass.io is available to use in many other ways.
If a user wants absolute beginner instructions they should almost always be pointed towards using the HassOS image. Specifically, in this thread, Makis started by asking;
This is not a question that appears to come from an absolute beginner, hence directing him to use the guide.
You can disagree with what someone should, or shouldn’t be shown how to use, that is your prerogative, however, the OP asks for help beyond someone who is an absolute beginner and wishes to move beyond a basic install on a Pi.